Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Protestors Pelt Rove

What should happen when a presidential advisor has "unknown" objects thrown at him?

Arrests for assault or nothing?

The students then got on the ground and lay down in front of his car as a protest. The students said security officials picked them up and carried them away so Rove could leave. Police said they have dealt with a lot of protests on campus and this one was handled peacefully. No one was arrested. [Emphasis added.]

That's right, nothing. They attack you and nothing happens to them. And what does this accomplish? It let's future protestors know that they can get away with attempted assault and they will try it again if given the chance. Like in the Iraq war, the RoE with protestors are too restrictive- they end up doing nothing to these violent punks. Nobody is surprised when protestors get away with this and others go on to attack on another day.

Suddenly, he was interrupted by a voice from the rear of the room. It was Bill Kelly. "How can you claim gridlock when the House and Senate are controlled by members of your own party?" asked Kelly. "You promised a middle-class tax cut. Now you are proposing the largest tax increase in American history. What you need to do is abide by your original campaign promise of a middle-class tax cut."

Kelly was quickly escorted out, with the President lecturing his back--and the cameras: "This is not your meeting, sir. Most people have better manners than to interrupt somebody giving a speech. I might say that's another thing wrong with this country. There's not enough civility in how we treat one another."

Three hours later, federal agents surrounded Kelly's family home, put him in handcuffs, and took him to the Metropolitan Correction Center (or the Black Hole of Chicago, as some call it), where he was interrogated and stripsearched, and, as he tells it, "spent the next 27 hours moving from [a] solitary cell to the federal lock-up with drug dealers and bank robbers in handcuffs and leg irons."

Kelly was then taken to court, charged under a catchall title of the U.S. Code with being in the same area of a building as the President of the United States, and released under a general agreement requiring that he not get arrested again for a similar crime--which means, apparently, avoiding all places where Presidents may be visiting.

Nothing was thrown at Clinton. Just words that Clinton did not want to hear. A very minor case of heckling as Kelly did not insult or swear. For this William J. Kelly was interogated and strip searched. Yet Rove's protestors walk. Will the White House object to local police? I doubt it. They seem to have a live and let live policy which seems really stupid to me. The attacks against them are going to get worse unless they insist that protestors who resort to violence are charged with the most serious crimes. Like the policy in Iraq where an insurgent could drop his weapon after firing and our soldiers could not fire at an unarmed man, we are just making it easier for the enemies of this nation to attack.